Little could James Joyce have foreseen the avalanche of cliché he was setting in motion when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with [a] now legendary sentence…. In thousands of first novels since Joyce's revolutionary use of the baby artist's earliest lisping literacies half a century ago, a precocious horde of sensitive, rebellious, grimly ambitious children—every last one of them wise and gifted beyond his tender years—have marched to the same leitmotif: The child is father of the novelist, and the proper study of a young writer is Himself when young.
It has been left to the ingenious imagination of still another first novelist, a Brown University graduate student named Steven Millhauser, to stand the Künstlerroman genre on its swollen head in Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright…. Not in the least by chance, he has also produced a brilliant parody of Literary Biography (Semi-Worshipful)…. Compared to Jeffrey's zealous sense of purpose, his industrious concentration on his subject's infinite variety and plenitude of sameness, James Boswell seems inattentive, Richard Ellmann's Joyce slipshod, Leon Edel's James cursory. (p. 15)
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